Windows Phone 7 Episodes

This episode we are we are going to take a look at how to use and harness the power of Value Converters.

A Value Converter (IValueConverter) allows for you to perform custom logic during Bind time in XAML based applications. With a value converter you can implement pretty much any type of complex logic you want (bool to visibility, changing styles, etc) at runtime and have this logic extracted away in a stand alone class.

This episode we are we are going to take a look at how to use and harness the power of Behaviors.

A Behavior in Silverlight is a way to extend an existing UI element in order to add additional state or actions to it. We can create these Behaviors and attach them to pretty much any UI element you could hope for.

This episode we are we are going to take another look at SQL CE on WP7 Mango.

However, in this episode we will go a step further and learn how to setup relationships (aka associations) between our tables (aka models). We will focus on how to use the [Association] attribute to link our parent-child models together.

This episode we are we are going to take a look at how to setup and use SQL Ce inside your WP7 Mango Applications.

Prior to Mango being released developers had to resource to storing their data in isolated storage, but now with SQL CE they can use a full RDBM system to store their data. In this episode we will take a look at how to get up and running with SQL CE

This episode we are we are going to take a look at how we can use Live Tiles in WP7 (Mango).

WP7 Mango has introduced not only the ability to create Application Tiles via code but they have also added the ability to create Secondary Tiles, tiles which can deep link into your application. These Secondary tiles can also be created, updated and deleted in code and can provide a very powerful feature for your application.

In this episode we are going to take a look at how to use the Location Services (GPS) built into the Windows Phone 7 platform.

We will first take a look at how we can use the location servcies library on the phone to get the phones current GPS information. We will then take a look at how we can use that information in conjuction w/ the Bing Services to get the street address for the GPS coordinates

In this episode we are going to take a look at how to read and write data to Isolated Storage for Silverlight on the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Since the WP7 platform does not have a built in RDMS system you must utilized Isolated Storage in order to persist data between runs. We will look at how to both read and write data using 2 different techniques in this episode.

In this episode we are going to take a look at how the phone uses themes and styles.

We will focus on how to determine which theme is being used as well as learning how to swap out our resource files which are used by our application based on the active theme. Knowing which theme is in use will allow your application to better conform to either the light or dark user experience.

In this episode we are going to take a look at store data in Isolated Storage on the phone

Storing data in Isolated Storage on the phone is critical because there is no sql database which can run on the phone at this point. In this episode we will look at how we can store and retrieve data to storage on the phone.

In this episode we are going to take a look at how to handle tombstoning (when your application is not longer in focus, but is not shut down yet) in your WP7 application.

When building out a WP7 application it is critical that your application can handle Tombstoning and rebuild itself as needed. This is to allow the user to have their work flow interrupted by an action, but still gives them the ability to back into your app and resume from there last usage point. In fact if you fail to take Tombstoning into account your application will fail certification.

In this episode we are going to continue taking a look at the Windows Phone 7 Api.

In this episode we are going to focus on learning about the various ways you can navigate from page to page within your application. Because WP7 is based off of Silverlight 3.x you are able to utilize all the native silverlight navigation techniques such as static routing (hard wiring the .xaml path), using routes and using the NavigationService.

In this episode we are going to take a look at how to create the Application Bar for Windows Phone 7When creating an application with Win Phone 7 you may need to create an application bar which contains menus or icons. In this episode we will show you how to create both global app bars as well as local app bars.